Phil Plait famous quotes

03-28-2025

Pseudoscience is like a virus. At low levels, it's no big deal, but when it reaches a certain threshold it becomes sickening.
-- Phil Plait

#Levels #Viruses #Pseudoscience
You can experience the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, see things no one has ever seen before, know something no one has ever known before. ... Welcome to science, you're gonna like it here.
-- Phil Plait

#Discovery #Feelings #Thrill
Our solar system is fantastically bizarre. There are worlds with features we never imagined. Storms larger than planets, moons with under-surface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that swap places...and that's just at Saturn.
-- Phil Plait

#Ocean #Moon #Lakes
Teach a man to reason and he will think for a lifetime.
-- Phil Plait

#Men #Thinking #Lifetime
Welcome to science. Youâ€™re gonna like it here.
-- Phil Plait

#Welcome
I still hear some people say that science takes the wonder out of life. Those people are utterly wrong. Science takes us to the wonder
-- Phil Plait

#People #Wonder #Stills
Not everything thatâ€™s cool is science, but everything in science is cool.
-- Phil Plait
They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.
-- Phil Plait

#Stars #Life Lesson #Forever
The Universe is cool enough without making up crap about it.
-- Phil Plait

#Enough #Crap #Making Up
It's amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we'll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away."Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective.
-- Phil Plait

#Morning #Math #Moon
However, science isn't just about showing when you're right; it's also about showing when you're wrong.
-- Phil Plait
I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration
-- Phil Plait

#Inspiration #Tired #Ignorance
If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment.
-- Phil Plait

#Motivation #War #Inspiration
Just like people, stars can be important without being terribly bright.
-- Phil Plait

#Stars #People #Important
If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.
-- Phil Plait

#Kids #Eye #Blue
I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.
-- Phil Plait

#Inspiration #Ignorance #Tired
Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs had a bad day.
-- Phil Plait

#Bad Day #Years #Dinosaurs
The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote.
-- Phil Plait

#Differences #Space #Dinosaurs
Itâ€™s dead obvious that creationism isnâ€™t science, or even bad science. Itâ€™s nonsense. But Iâ€™ve long stated itâ€™s also bad religion, because it doesnâ€™t just take faith, it also takes a phenomenal disregard of reality.
-- Phil Plait

#Reality #Long #Nonsense
Other job markets may lay claim to the title, but astronomy is actually the world's oldest profession.
-- Phil Plait

#Jobs #World #May
Some people try to tell me that science will never answer the big questions we have in life. To them I say: baloney! The real problem is your questions aren't big enough.
-- Phil Plait

#Real #People #Trying
A lot of them complain because they say the word denial puts them in the same bin as holocaust deniers. That's too bad. But the thing is, they do have something in common: a denial of evidence and of scientific consensus.
-- Phil Plait

#Holocaust #Complaining #Denial
How do you convince someone they're not thinking clearly, when they're not thinking clearly? What we're actually saying is no magic, no afterlife, no higher moral authoritative father-figure, no security, and no happy ever after. This is a tough sell.
-- Phil Plait

#Father #Thinking #Afterlife
The best idea ever thought of in the history of humanity is useless unless someone communicates it. It will die in the test tube. And in our case, what we're communicating here to people is not necessarily something they want to hear. And so, our demeanor - how we deliver this message - takes on crucial, crucial importance.
-- Phil Plait

#Ideas #People #Humanity

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